With unprecedented growth in Internet traffic and emergence of IP Telephony and new Multimedia Services, there is a great need to decouple service development and service deployment from underlying, frequently changing network technology. This is driven by competitive market pressures to attract new customers by offering bundled services, at a competitive price, with minimum time to market. In addition service customers are expecting more control over subscribed to services, and the capability to modify the services. This alone, puts new demands on service creation methodology to shorten service development cycle, and on service creation environment to be user friendly, accessible via Internet, and to allow for third party application development. Applications are run in service execution environment, which has to be highly reliable, scalable, and capable of executing any registered application, independently of this where this application was created.
The networks currently deployed to provide Internet Telephony and Multimedia Services have prescribed service logic that offers limited functionality, at best. Typically, there are dedicated servers, which provide a service with a logic programmed in Java, C++, or other programming language. The limited flexibility dramatically limits the features available to subscribers of the IP Telephony and Multimedia Services. Thus, there is a great need for a new paradigm in service creation methodology and associated with it service creation and service execution environments.